Title: Anonymous Mesh Messaging for Large-Scale Protests

Speaker: Sarah Radway, Harvard University

Date & Time: April 12, 2024, 12:30pm

Location: Steinman Hall Exhibit Room

Abstract: Large-scale protests are an important form of civil action against authoritarian regimes. They inherently require communication, which leads these regimes to shut down the Internet in an attempt to quash the movement. Ad-hoc mesh messaging between smartphones has been studied as a potential solution. Current techniques do not scale to thousands of users, however, due to their use of simple broadcasting and pairwise communications. In this talk, I will describe Amigo, the first system for anonymous mesh messaging in groups. Amigo is specifically tailored towards large-scale protest communication. We create routing protocols and cryptographic key agreement protocols that take advantage of group structure to allow for more reliable, efficient, and private communications. We evaluate Amigo and perform an extensive comparison to prior work using representative simulations derived from real-world protest scenarios. Amigo is able to provide large-scale protests with anonymous group communications in the face of Internet shutdowns.

Bio: Sarah Radway is a computer science PhD student at Harvard University, where she is advised by James Mickens. She is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and was recently awarded a Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Prize Fellowship. Her research interests lie in the security and privacy space—she is particularly interested in questions that address technical or regulatory weaknesses, caused by new technologies, organizations, and power structures.

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